A Chicago startup backed by the CIA and used by the Chicago Police Department has landed at the center of a battle over privacy and social media afterreports that its platform was being used for government surveillance.

Geofeedia helps clients monitor social media posts tied to a specific placefor services including location-based advertising. But it made global news this week — and the fuel for its product dried up — after Twitter joined Facebook and Instagram in cutting off its access to user data.

Think of it as TweetDeck for cops: As people tweet from a particular location, Geofeedia's technology organizes the tweets for police to read and analyze. The Chicago Police Department said it uses the tool to monitor activity at special events, including large sports gatherings, but that its use for "First Amendment protected" events requires greater oversight.

Geofeedia has raised almost $24 million in venture capital and said in February that it had 60 employees at the time, with plans to add more. Since making a statement on Tuesday, it has declined to comment further.

Malkia Cyril is executive director of the Oakland, Calif.-based Center for Media Justice, which co-signed a letter with the ACLU to Facebook and Twitter calling for more protection of user data.

“The bottom line is, we’re in a 21st-century movement for human and civil rights all over the country and all over the world,” she said. “(Surveilling) the social media profiles and social media information of users who are not suspected of any crime violates our constitutional right to free speech. It also violates our constitutional right to privacy.”

Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris said in a statement Tuesday that the company plans to build on its civil rights protections, working “with key civil liberty stakeholders, including the ACLU, and the law enforcement community to make sure that we do everything in our power to support the security of the American people and the protection of personal freedoms.”

Chicago police use Geofeedia and other "publicly available tools … to monitor open source social media for special events and functions (sporting games, marathon, etc.)," police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in an email to Blue Sky. "However any investigation or monitoring regarding First Amendment protected activity needs a special request and designation and receives legal monitoring and oversight by the Office of General Counsel."

The Aurora Police Department also used the service — in one case to catch a woman smoking marijuana in its parking lot, according to the document. A police spokesman said they dropped it after about a year because it wasn’t worth the investment.

Geofeedia was gathering its real-time data from just seven sources — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and Reddit, according to the document reported on by the Daily Dot. Losing data from the biggest players could mean trouble for the startup, said Kellogg School of Management Professor Brian Uzzi.

Geofeedia will need to renegotiate its contracts with the social media companies or find out a new way to do business. To do that, they’ll have to make a case for how much good the data can do, Uzzi said.

“They have to get (their) clients to talk about all the pro-social things they were able to do with that data … the measurable things. How many lives have I saved, how much man time have I saved,” he said. “That’s the first step to the negotiation table to begin making this work for everybody.”

With civil liberties in question, that won’t be easy.

Facebook said in a statement to the Washington Post that access to Geofeedia was limited to data that people chose to make public.

Twitter has cut off Geofeedia's access to its data after a report found that law enforcement has been using Geofeedia to monitor activists and protesters.

Twitter has cut off Geofeedia's access to its data after a report found that law enforcement has been using Geofeedia to monitor activists and protesters.

That’s true, said Christopher Dore, partner at Chicago-based Edelson, a law firm that focuses on technology and privacy-related class action suits. But the legal line blurs when all that data gets pulled into one place and meaning begins to form around it.

“What I don’t think people understand is thinking about it in the aggregate … (they don’t) think about themselves as a group and how they’re being tracked as a group,” he said. “Technology makes it possible to streamline that in such an incredible way that you can make all these connections.”

People put their trust in companies when they hand over access to information, Dore said. Many technology companies make promises to protect their users' data, Twitter and Geofeedia included.

Twitter has a policy banning use of data to “investigate, track or surveil Twitter users.” Geofeedia’s service agreement says law enforcement can’t use its platform at events “political in nature,” or in a discriminatory way.

But there’s no government regulation of these policies, Dore said, so the onus is on the tech companies.

“The question worth asking in all of these instances: Is anyone minding the store? Is anyone actually paying attention to what their APIs are being used for and making real-time decisions to cut people off?” Dore said. “Or is it really just the fact that someone calls them out and they get caught.”

If social media starts to morph from a place where the public can voice opinions and influence others to a tool used for surveillance, people may start to decide it’s better to not say anything at all on the platforms, Uzzi said.

“If everybody decides it’s better to say nothing, than Twitter has no business, Facebook has no business, and all of that falls apart,” he said. “That is the pickle that Geofeedia has themselves in right now.”